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Friday, 18 October 2013

How To Compost - Henshaw's Horticultural Blog

Keeping you in tune with my gardening, I've just done a bit of weeding, tended to my patch and relocated my Christmas tree ... but what I'm really excited about ... is my compost bin ! (maybe a misappropriation of the word 'excited' there, but it is nice!)

This is my colourful compost. I've said it before and I'll say it again, I believe composting is the first step in saving human kind. I'm no dystopian, I don't think it'll get as bad as all that, but we'd like to keep this place nice, right? Making compost is the ultimate in recycling. You take a bunch of stuff you normally would throw away – eggshells, carrot scraping, yellowed lettuce leaves–throw them in a pile with some dried leaves, leave it all there for a while, and voila! Rich, brown compost! And while making compost won’t exactly save the world, if all of us in the cities, suburbs and estates made compost and used it instead of the petrochemicals, fertilisers, slug repelants, pesticides, insecticides and the rest of it that we pour on to our lawns and gardens today, our environment would be cleaner and safer for us and our children.

Composting helps the ecology, improving soil quality, improving drainage, aiding the growth of plants and hence improving the air quality. Composting has financial benefits too, and economical, saves you buying it in plastic bags, saves buying expensive mulch and transporting such things around the country. We can all have an abundance of great soil in our back yards, balcony or grounds. And we all know that growing your own produce is good for your wallet. The educational benefits are there too, every school, group or community around the country should have a compost heap. Learn responsibilty for your waste, reduce waste, learn about the circle of life, where your food goes and where your food comes from.

This may seems like just ranting, but that's just the kind of beat poet rambling gardener that I am, just taking a break from cleaning out the shed, having some lunch and a cup of tea and filling you in, so let's make a more succinct list, if you're anything like my brother, I know you'll love a list ... here's what to compost and what not to compost, in a Smash Hits style What's Hot and What's Not, or a Vice Magazine Dos and Don'ts ...

The key to getting great compost is to ensure that you get the right mix! You want to try and get a 50/50 mix of ‘Green’ wastes such as fruit and vegetable peelings and garden clippings and ‘Brown’ wastes such as newspaper, shredded paper or cardboard. Getting this mix right will help your compost to aerate and break down quicker.

However, there are some things you should never add to your compost bin including; meat, cooked vegetables, dairy products, dog faeces or cat litter, nappies, diseased plants or perennial weeds.